On the intersection of technology, media, politics, culture, and everyday life

March 26, 2009

Making Twitter Meaningful

The viral Twouble with Twitters has gotten some acknowledging laughs. Funny men Jon Stewart and Colbert have also recently joked about the seemingly useless time suck and stream of information. But as Twitter grows, so has the number of people experimenting with how to build on top of the simple interface -- creating applications to help filter and facilitate community meaning making.

For me, some of the more interesting uses of Twitter have been for friend/crowd-sourcing human answers, rapid reporting around an event/emergency, and directing attention towards causes. Squidoo recently release TwttrStrm to help folks gather answers to one spot. An example of what that might look like is the summary of Hacking Education Twitters (pulling hashtag #HackEdu). Focusing on a particular niche, ExecTweets is a new site aggregating tweets from business executives. And more like a general Twitter search engine, Tweefind pulls tweets about certain keywords according to popularity rank (akin to Google page rank).

Will also be interesting to watch as folks get more creative about designing a "need to follow." In LA, Kogi, a hybrid Korean BBQ/Taco truck, has put a twist to its Twittering. If you want their taco, to find the van you must follow their Twitter.